


Long, Long Time

by Kahvi



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, F/M, M/M, Possibly Unrequited Love, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:50:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahvi/pseuds/Kahvi
Summary: He was only going away for a moment. Just a moment.





	Long, Long Time

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Endgames](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18733942) by [Roadstergal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadstergal/pseuds/Roadstergal). 



There were so many versions of the song. Steve no longer knew if he'd first heard the instrumental, or if he'd always known the lyrics; in short, what it was that had made him fall in love with her. Because the love, like the song, with time, had spiraled into something far more than the sum of its notes. Hum me a few bars?

He puts the dark mist back into the woman. Stopping by the balustrades on his way out, he lets Mjølner go, feeling it fly to its true master, which when you think about it, was none. Steve is done thinking. On a rooftop in New York, he gives a tall, pale woman back her green gem. She looks at him askew, and says, "do you know what you are doing? Truly?" And he smiles, because he does not understand.

Scepter in the box, next to his sleeping self. Not true sleep, but what is, these days. Hesitating, he leans down against the sprawled red white and blue, finds his ear under his helmet, lifts it, and whispers: "He does not love you."

Bright blue box inside the metal box. Close it up, like so, and run away before the bad man comes.

Under a canopy of mountain-bones, a shadow tells him there is no stone to return. "Show yourself," Steve tells it, but it pulls further back. He has already made his sacrifice, it says, with words that have no sound. All that remains is payment. He wakes in a puddle of warm stars, with a yellow pebble in his hand. And he does not understand.

He places the last little morsel, what is left of this fight, on the pedestal from which it came, and watches as a shell grows around it, jagged and coarse. And it is done.

And he has one more vial of particles.

 

* * *

 

It is his fingers. They move on their own, tapping in the date and year, and hour, and second. When he opens his eyes, he fully expects to see sea and metal and green grass and friends. It is only when he steps onto the hardwood, and with the hard clack of his boot remembers the suit and where he is all at once, that it hits him he can never go back. This is his own doing, and didn't it germinate, subtly, slowly, this idea, since he'd found the vials in Pym's lab? Why else had he taken exactly enough?

She is here. Of course she's there. As yet, he stands at a distance, watching her breathe and fret. Her hair is the color of the faded photograph. He does not know it yet, but she smells like lilies.

 

* * *

  

There are so many versions of that song. It plays in their living room, in their lives as they dance into it, and how does it go? That's what they have to figure out, and for a time, that is enough. They only know so much about the other, after all, and there is fun in that discovery. It goes well. They make love. Move in. Marry, not in that order, but in a rush, because it's been too long, for Steve. He has to catch up, always feeling like he's running just behind the times.

But times change. And month by month, he remembers. There are are things to be done. He tells her about HYDRA, and she looks at him with worried eyes and asks about toast. He tells her about Bucky, and she smiles and tells him he is dead, and it is sad. They speak in circles for weeks, Steve digging in his mind for addresses, pictures, names, presenting each in turn like trump cards across the table, and nothing. Smiles and toast and wine and coffee; flowers in the yard, lilies on the table. He saved Bucky. That is a fixed point, already happened, and cannot be undone, and he clings to it. Clings to the future he has lived while the world around him changes.

He dreams of the woman in New York, of her face when he hands her the stone. _"Do you know what you are doing? Truly?"_ And he wakes, and wonders, no longer smiling. Peggy breathes next to him, the sum total of his world, and all he has decided he needs, therefore she has to be. And is that fair? He kisses her shoulder in the darkness, and forces sleep. One more night.

One more day. Always another. He tells her about the future, and starts to listen like he hasn't done before, and in so realizing, _she_ doesn't. Smiles and nods and little touches of her hands and lips, a comforting sigh, a noncommittal word, but no understanding. It slips from her like water on oilskin, never sticking, never permeating. He gets angry at the placid look on her face. Runs, terrified of himself, of the thought stirring in him, of the reality he's running through. _Do you know what you are doing? No,_ he says, ignoring the stares of the neighbors. _No, no.  
_

 

* * *

 

He finds the facility. It takes him months, and this world has no computers or cellphones, and this is the first time he misses them. The fast trains. The short, cheap, easy flights. Steve fights his way through defenses and guards and traps that do him no harm, until he finds the room where they're keeping him. Bucky. He tries to walk inside, but a guard shows up. He tries again. The ceiling collapses. He stumbles out, waits, sees them repair it, sees Bucky is all right. He tries again. Someone catches him and summons all the guards, and the fight takes them back outside. He defeats them. He tries again. An alarm goes off. He tries again. _  
_

He tries again.

Weeks pass. He's out of food and water, he's exhausted and terrified and lost, but he tries again. He is never arrested, or escorted from the area. No reinforcements show up, there is nothing but this place, and Bucky, and Steve, and trying again and again and again.

When he comes back to Peggy, she does not remember that he left.

 

* * *

 

There are many, many version of that song. They are written, set down like his past, and his past cannot be changed. He is in his own past. Not the timeline of the stones, not another universe. He doesn't know how; it shouldn't be possible; he shouldn't be here, and he can't change anything. And there is time. Always, there is time. A long, long time. Never felt like this, my dear, since can't remember when. Desegregation and killings and mobs and hate. Vietnam. Tony's parents, dying by Bucky's hand while Steve watched on, stuck and stuck and stuck. 

Hum me a few bars.

Peggy gets sick. They move. He loses track of time; he stops counting his age after seventy, and stops counting the years long before. Soon. Soon, he can stop. Soon, he will catch up to himself, and sit on a bench and not look at Bucky, because he failed him again and again and again.

But it doesn't stop. Can't. Remember when. Long, long... And he keeps away from them, and he moves far away, because the life he claimed to have was never his; instead, he took hers, he took everything, and Tony is gone, and all that is left his the repeating refrain.

Again. Again.

 

* * *

 

Steve gasped as he fell onto the grassy hill. His old lungs struggled, his eyes, without glasses, could barely see the figure in front of him.

"Hey, old man. Well, I say that, but it's your own fault at this point. Just get a grip, you'll get used to it."

He could control it now. His breath, his eyes, he could focus. And Tony was there, and before he could open his mouth, Steve was clinging to him, years falling away like ashen sheets of music. "I got it wrong," he wheezed. "I got it wrong."

And Tony held him, patting his back, slowly.

"I never saved him. I never saved you. I pulled her life off track. I tried."

"Oh, sweetheart," Tony said, the smell of whatever heaven this was settling around them, sweet as lilacs, "that's all we ever do."


End file.
